MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY LÊ QUỐC NGUYÊN SOME SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE SPEAKING SKILL FOR THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS AT THANH HOA UNIVERSITY OF CULTURE, SPORTS AND TOURISM (TUCST) MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION NGHỆ AN - 2014 2 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY LÊ QUỐC NGUYÊN SOME SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE SPEAKING SKILL FOR THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS AT THANH HOA UNIVERSITY OF CULTURE, SPORTS AND TOURISM (TUCST) Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Code: 60.14.01.11 MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION Supervisor: M.A. PHAN THỊ HƯƠNG NGHỆ AN - 2014 4 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby acknowledge that this study is my own work. The data and findings discussed in the thesis are true, used with permission, and have not been published elsewhere. Author Lê Quốc Nguyên v TABLE OF CONTENTS vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisor Mrs. Phan Thi Huong for her precious advice, practical suggestions and constant encouragement in the preparation and completion of this graduation paper. Without her help this graduation paper would not have possibly been completed I wish to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to the teacher of Department of post- graduate studies who supply me with the good conditions to conduct this thesis and finish This M.A course. I would be also grateful to the teachers and students at Thanh Hoa University of culture, sports and tourism for their assistance and unwillingness to permit me to observe their classes, interview and to answer my questionnaire. Due to the limited scope, mistakes in this graduation paper are inevitable. Therefore, I hope to receive further comments and advice from the readers to make it better. 1 ABSTRACT This thesis aims to find out the difficulties in teaching and learning speaking skill that teachers and non-English major students encountered at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism and give some suggestions for developing the students’ speaking skill. The study includes three main parts. The study begins with the introduction, which includes rationale, scope of the study, aims of the study, significance of the study, methodology and design of the study. Part two includes three chapters in which the first chapter presents the related literature, the second chapter, the heart of study, gives a brief introduction of Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism, describes the study in detail, the third chapter deals with the summary, finding and pedagogical implications of study. Part three is the conclusion, which focuses on the summary of the research. 2 LIST OF TABLES, GRAPHS AND FIGURES Table 1: Teachers’ experience of teaching Table 2: Difficulties from Students Table 3: Teacher pedagogical Practices in teaching speaking skill Table 4: Students’ opinions on inappropriate teacher pedagogical practices in English speaking lessons Table 5: Teachers’ English communicative competence Table 6: Students’ history of learning English Table 7: Students’ time of learning English Table 8: Students’ attitude towards speaking skill Table 9: Factors making the students unwilling to speak in class Table 10: Students’ difficulties in learning speaking Table 11: Students’ interest in speaking ABBREVIATIONS TUCST: Thanh Hoa university of Culture, Sports and Tourism STT: Student talk time TTT: Teacher talk time EFL: English as foreign Language ESL: English as Second Language GE: General English ESP: English for Specific Purpose ELT: English language teaching CLT: Communicative language Teaching No of Students: Number of Students No of Teachers: Number of Teachers 3 PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Nowadays, English plays an important role in all over the World. People use English in most of areas, like science, technology, business and commerce, international relations and so on. English is a useful bridge to help people from other countries understand and say a same language. It is the main language of most international organization like NATO, European free trade Association. Most all international conferences and competitions use English. For example; miss World contest and World cup. Now Internet and mobile phone are very popular to contact people from all the world and the language for them are written in English. Adult and children from different counties can talk, share the idea and learn about the culture through Internet and Mobile phone by English. Someone can travel around the world if he can speak English well and so on. In Vietnam, English has been taught from primary level and in most of final test student have to pass English exam as an essential requirements Mai Thanh Thu (2008,) in her research about speaking difficulties which students faced when they studied speaking, mentioned that Speaking is one of four important skills that should be paid attention to in the process of teaching and learning. The goal of learning speaking should improve students’ communicative skill, by that way, students can express their ideas. But in fact, a large number of students at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism find it difficult to speak in English as they have to think for a long time about what they intend to say before they can actually speak some words. Even worse, some cannot speak any English at all. When students speak English badly, one tends to blame the students for having poor ability or making insufficient effort. However, there are other important factors in teaching and learning process that should be taken into consideration such 4 [...]... teaching materials, attitude of teachers and students toward the subject, etc For the above-mentioned reasons, the author has chosen to do a study entitled Some suggestions to improve Speaking skill for the second year students at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism (TUCST) This study will try to find out problems and suggest some solutions to improve the teaching and learning English speaking. .. mention the rationale to choose the research methodology and the data gather from questionnaire 2.1 The Teaching and learning situation in Thanh Hoa University of culture, sports and tourism 2.1.1 Brief introduction of TUCST Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism is located in Thanh Hoa city, Thanh Hoa provice, it was founded in 1990 At the beginning, its duty was to train only teachers of. .. to achieve the aims set forth, the following research questions are posed 1 What are the difficulties met by the second year students of culture management when they learn speaking skill at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism? 2 What are the difficulties for the teachers in teaching speaking skill? 3 What are effective solutions to those difficulties? 4 Significance of the study 5 The. .. our university has decided that English is the main subject with the purpose of helping these nonmajor students to develop their English communicative skill to meet the demand of their future employment 2.1.2 Syllabus used for non - English major students at TUCST The teaching of English is divided into two stages at Thanh Hoa University of culture, sports and tourism At first stage (consisting of the. .. lines”, then suggest solutions to the problems in order to help students improve their speaking skill 3 Aims of the study The study is carried out with aims to: - Investigate the students attitude toward speaking skill - Investigate teachers and non- English major students areas of speaking difficulties - Give some suggestions to solve the problems so as to improve teaching and learning speaking skill. .. expected to enhance teaching method of speaking to the second year students and the students learning of speaking skill 5 Methodology The study will be carried out based on material collection and survey questionnaires For the theoretical basis, reference materials on speaking from various sources are collected, gathered, analyzed and synthesized considerately for the content of the intended thesis For the. .. life and this is a big problem in learning speaking skill Most of students at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism usually said that they don’t know why they have to learn English; they don’t know to use what they learnt in real life so, this stage, students have much more changes to apply what they have learned into real life, they can use language to express their idea and share their... Vietnamese, and then translate into English when they want to express their idea This takes a lot of time because they have to think of how to put the words and their thought in order This is not useful because 21 while they pay attention to thinking and translating, the others may stand up and say what they want to transfer from Vietnamese to English in class Hence they have lost the change of speaking. .. is the students turn, the students have much more time to practice, the aim of this stage is to improve students speaking skill, the teacher lets students with their partners, they can work in pair or groups The main purpose of this stage is to improve students speaking skill, to help them speak fluently so the teacher shouldn’t care much about the students mistakes, the teacher shouldn’t stop students. .. in a second or foreign language There are a lot of concepts of speaking Each researcher gives his own idea and tries to approve that it is true But all of them agree that speaking is very important skill, and they all try to find out the nature of speaking, speaking act, in which the speakers, speaking process, and speaking message are emphasized 1.3 Spoken language and communication Speaking is the . MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY LÊ QUỐC NGUYÊN SOME SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE SPEAKING SKILL FOR THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS AT THANH HOA UNIVERSITY OF CULTURE, SPORTS AND TOURISM (TUCST) MASTER’S. skill for the second year students at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism (TUCST) This study will try to find out problems and suggest some solutions to improve the teaching and. teaching and learning speaking skill that teachers and non-English major students encountered at Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism and give some suggestions for developing the students